Rage and the $100/month food budget

luka

Well-known member
I'm not nostalgic. Dissensus was fundamentally founded on nostalgia. That's why I'm the chaos demon to haunt both the leftists and rightists on this forum. @luka and @craner conceived me after a long cyborg sodomy session as their evil step son to terrorise all of you and sharpen your minds. A frankenstein's monster.
It wasn't really it was founded on grime but it doesn't matter
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
For instance you're ignoring how the colonising whites made common cause with indigenous aristocrats in many Latin American countries.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Perhaps only when in crisis mode, when battling colonial armies. Otherwise, awesome

The hollowest construction is the one that wants to confront this infamous world (whose potential, however, is exceptionally high) of capitalist civilisation (and also the majority of the proletarians, who are now being used as a result of major historical mistakes) with the alternative of the phantom of barbarism: It may be that there will be no creative revolution of a new world, that it will be strangled, but there will still be a crisis of collapse in today’s society: instead of passing to socialism, will it be a fall from civilisation to barbarism? This threat, of purely cerebral calibre, will not frighten any bourgeois and will not encourage any proletarian to fight. No society disintegrates because of its internal laws, its internal necessity, if these laws and this necessity do not lead to the uprising of a human mass organised with the weapons in hand – something we know and expect. There is no death without trauma for any “class civilisation”, no matter how corrupt and disgusting it may be.
As far as the barbarism is concerned, which is supposed to arise spontaneously after the death of capitalism as a result of its disintegration: If we regard its disappearance as a necessary condition for further development, which then had to lead inevitably through the swamp of the subsequent civilisation, then there is nothing so terrible about its characteristics as a human form of coexistence that an unexpected return could frighten us.
Just as against Rome the wild hordes were needed – so that so many and great useful contributions to the organisation of people and things would not be lost – which were unconscious contributors to a much bigger revolution still far away in time, we want the gates of this bourgeois world of profiteers, oppressors and butchers to be struck by a powerful barbaric wave capable of burying this world among itself.
But just as there are borders, walls and curtains in this world, all forces, even though they compete against each other, are gathering around the tradition of this very civilisation.
When the revolutionary movement of the working class becomes strong again, organises and arms itself, and when formations emerge that do not adhere to the civilisation of an Acheson or Malik[14], then these will be the barbaric forces that will not disdain the ripe fruit of modern industrial potential, but will snatch it from the throat of the exploiters by breaking their still sharp teeth.

 

sus

Well-known member
usual no offense caveat, but how many immigrants do you actually know/have you known?

bc I have personally have known many, both legal and illegal, and I certainly would not describe them by and large as feeling "only grateful"

there is a vast gulf of difference between "could be worse" and "grateful"

virtually all the non-affluent/white collar immigrants I've known were generally as unexcited about backbreaking/dead-end jobs as anyone else would be, but they 1) were stuck doing them for obvious (language, lack of education, not having papers, etc) reasons 2) had, as you say, minimal representation to officially make their discontent known. incidentally this is also how migrant laborers wind up being exploited by unscrupulous employers who know that they have significantly less ability to address unfair labor practices.

this line of reasoning is basically the same one as people in the Global South are grateful for their sweatshop jobs which are better than starving, the 19th-century proletariat was grateful for their miserable sweatshops jobs which were better than starvation etc

if this was already comprehensively covered in the last few pages apologies, I don't have time to read it rn
Pockets, split between affluent and not. Went to a bilingual school in California that was 50/50 native Spanish and English speakers. And know a lot of first-gen folk with immigrant parents, but these are screened through usual social filter, i.e. they're probably not working min-wage jobs.

I'm not sure I disagree with any of your points, and I'm sure many immigrants have more complex feelings than some naive gratitude. Nor am I wanting to justify sweatshop labor. I just wanted to show that there were cases of similar material situations being interpreted very differently, and "grateful immigrants," stereotype though it is, has enough kernel of truth to make that general case.
 

sus

Well-known member
The proletariat was more grateful for the opportunities offered by colonisation, and flocked to the New World in their tens of millions. And there was little stopping them. The most enterprising went beyond the pale and lived peaceably with the natives. It was quite a problem for colonial authorities. The best of times.
The story of indigenous populations being crushed and displaced is as much about their being effective opposition to Old World authority. They offered a better, more fulfilling, primitive life to those they didn't scalp. It's very interesting.
This is what Terence Malick's New World is about,
 
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sus

Well-known member
There's something interesting in the Allen Iverson doubleness, radical and moderate at the same time. Something weird and important about how political vagueries circulate. What's the point? Is it weaponized? It seems important that we end up repeatedly realizing we agree. You can say that's just Spendo trying to be controversial, but that's not how it feels on the inside. There's a bit of extend-and-retreat, but mostly it feels like each of us are misinterpreting the other in predictable ways.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
I know people are at least half-kidding but framing my comments this way is scary for me. There's an asymmetry of caricaturing and/or misinterpretation. If you take the progressive stance, the worst I can misinterpret you as is an overzealous promoter of good, selfless values. If you challenge the progressive stance, you can be read as racist, misogynistic.
I get where youre coming from. Doubly frustrating because typically the critique of the progressive stance is the only interesting one to make.
 

sus

Well-known member
Yeah I mean that's sometimes how it feels, like leaning into being interesting means not re-iterating NPR talking points. But it's weird cuz all the grounding for what's "interesting" or a hot take or whatever is the immediate social context. Murray Davis says "Interesting theories are those which deny certain assumptions of their audience, while non-interesting theories are those which affirm certain assumptions of their audience." So boringness is a kind of redundancy, a predictableness.

In information theory, any data that doesn't give you more insight, that you can't actually learn anything from, is not even considered information. Information "a difference that makes a difference," something that changes how you understand or (more accurately) act.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
But that's what I've been doing for my entire existence on this forum. I've had nothing but utter contempt for progressive politics, But because I see them as mundane and boring, that is offensive to rightists who have now lost their social base of the affluent entrepreneurial/semi-religious middle class (college education is a double edged sword for even right wingers kids, natch!) and self-insulated and hence must sell new recruits the same leftist grift narritive of usurpers being the reason for their restriction of liberties. It's just an inversion of left wing christian morality. In this sense I agree that leftism has logical continuity with certain manifestations of the alt right. It's why I rejected the left to begin with. I historically situated them in their real context.
 
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linebaugh

Well-known member
I mean I think the tension, the doubless, comes from the sense that you find the questions of basic progressive fodder like racism and socioeconomics and etc. so boring and beneath intellectual consideration that you're effectively writing them out of your calculations, at least rhetorically, or that's where the jokes come from for me at least. like trying to talk about polo without mentioning theyre riding horses.
 
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sus

Well-known member
Part of it is, if I'm being honest, these problems are distant and I don't know what the solutions are. There's a million variables behind most of these problems, lots of smart people disagree on basic logistics how effective financial redistribution would be e.g.—so what else is there but try to nuance the conversation? (And to try to carve out a little land of your own to defend)
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
If I'm with my parents I lean conservative and when I'm with my libertarian friends I start talking about how the social contract is continually negotiated and we need universal health care. It's not "fake," it's a move in a game, and in fact, it comes out naturally/feels natural, it's not "a bit"

Yeah see we don't do that in the UK. they are all bastards, labour and tory. You genocided traditional societies out of existence so you don't have those sorts of cultures of deference to rebel against. There is no real conservatism in America, it's only ever economic with spectacle ideologies grafted on top.

America for instance could not invent a Roger Scruton. The closest you got was William Buckley.
 

sus

Well-known member
I mean I think the tension, the doubless, comes from the sense that you find the questions of basic progressive fodder like racism and socioeconomics and etc. so boring and beneath intellectual consideration that you're effectively writing them out of your calculations, at least rhetorically, or that's where the jokes come from for me at least. like trying to talk about polo without mentioning theyre riding horses.
Who knows, we may well disagree about how much X causes Y, but how could we even drill into it with words? It'd take ages. You'd have to start defining causation, drilling into indirect vs indirection, figure out your views on free will vs determinism
 

sus

Well-known member
Yeah see we don't do that in the UK. they are all bastards, labour and tory. You genocided traditional societies out of existence so you don't have those sorts
of cultures of deference to rebel against.
Thirdform take it to the trad thread! It needs your love and attention!
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
Who knows, we may well disagree about how much X causes Y, but how could we even drill into it with words? It'd take ages. You'd have to start defining causation, drilling into indirect vs indirection, figure out your views on free will vs determinism
and we cant even start there when you say crazy things like living in a slop house and eating wet dough all day is a viable lifestyle!
 
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